Important noticeBitgrail S.r.l. Informs its users that internal checks revealed unauthorized transactions which led to a 17 million Nano shortfall, an amount forming part of the wallet managed by Bitgrail S.r.l.

Today a charge about those fraudulent activities has been submitted to the competent authorities and now is under police investigation.

We inform you that the other currencies have not been involved.

In order to conduct further verifications, all the activities will be temporarily suspended (including withdrawals and deposits). This procedure is indispensable for users security.

We do offer our full and sincerest apologies to our customers and to whom has been involved into the illegal transfers of Nano occurred on our platform.

Other announcements will be released shortly.

Thank you for your attention.

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BitGrail was the fifth most popular exchange for XRB trading according to Coinmarketcap, however the volume has now been amended to zero. With a market valuation today of $10 per XRB, the to, al loss is estimated to be $170m.

The Nano Core team were informed by the owner of BitGrail, Francesco “The Bomber” Firano of the loss on Thursday. In a blog update they report that the fault appears to be related to BitGrail’s software. In private correspondence, Firano allegedly inquired as to the possibility of modifying the ledger in order to cover his losses, but the development team responded that this line of action:”[I]s not possible, nor is it a direction we would ever pursue.”

The blog posts then makes subtle accusations regarding the legitimacy of the hack, stating that:

“We now have sufficient reason to believe that Firano has been misleading the Nano Core Team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time.”

The team adds that criminal investigations are underway:

“Our team promptly contacted law enforcement and we are fully cooperating with law enforcement on this matter….We are preparing all information we have on the matter such as blockchain entries, screenshots, and chat logs”

Following the loss of XRB Bitgrail has claimed insolvency and is not in operation, whilst unofficial sources claim that the exchange had been insolvent months earlier. The source in question claims to have discovered that the account from which user funds had supposedly been lost funds, (BitGrail Representative 1), had multiple transactions of large even numbers, (e.g. 3000, 5000, 8000 XRB) to the Mercatox exchange. He/ she describes this behavior as suspicious, adding that:

tbf buying hashing power and coin tumbling is a very good way to launder money...

You would want to do the laundering soon. The major economies will put pressure on the companies registered in their jurisdiction to apply serious KYC legislation. This will push the companies to those ultra secure countries like Russia, Ukraine, and China.

tbf buying hashing power and coin tumbling is a very good way to launder money...

You would want to do the laundering soon. The major economies will put pressure on the companies registered in their jurisdiction to apply serious KYC legislation. This will push the companies to those ultra secure countries like Russia, Ukraine, and China.

In the days of proper capitalism, raw in tooth and claw, John pierpont Morgan, would have laughed askance at any of his bankers who denied unsecured credit to retail customers to dabble in speculation in currencies invented out of thin air backed by a mathematical equation.

I am across this to the degree that I have been doing bits a pieces of research over the last month on line and reading forums, I’m sure there are more knowledgeable posters on the subject. I hold XRP so look at through that lenses as well.

I'm looking for the issue that if it becomes a standard payment tech (like swift ) then the XRP has to become a standard price or worthless as banks and the payment system would be hostage to fortune.

Plus they'll have regulatory issues galore in he holding of an asset.

bimboman wrote:

It's difficult to value ripple if they become intrinsic as the regulators won't allow it.

Bimbo can you please enlarge on the above I am interested and want to better understand these issues.

Suppose Ripple is successful positioning XRP as a settlement currency for payments. Banks could still use market makers for settlement. The market makers would have to hold XRP in order to pay each other. Whether a particular bank will hold XRP or not depends on a lot of factors.

One is whether they can accomplish it from a regulatory perspective. This used to be a big obstacle but has not been such a big issue recently. While some banks cannot hold a speculative asset, they can get around this by employing a third party to act as the legal owner of the XRP. This third party would take the risk of a drop in value and gain the benefit of an increase in value.

How this would be structured depends on what the risk profile of holding XRP actually is. If the benefits of holding XRP exceed the risk, then the third party would pay the bank. If the risk exceeds the benefits, the bank would pay the third party. Banks typically consist of a large number of legal entities, not all of which are technically banks. So the third party can be an arm of the bank that is not itself a bank.

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A bank will hold XRP if:

It saves them money.They cannot get as good or better service from market makers.They can overcome any regulatory hurdles involved.

Ripple is actively pursuing strategies (such as xRapid) that allow XRP to act as a settlement currency without requiring FIs to hold XRP. Ensuring that there is sufficient market making to allow XRP liquidity into key corridors is also one of those strategies.

Even if banks do not hold XRP though, there are lots of other parties that would be heavily incentivized to hold a currency that is used as a settlement currency.

For one thing, you can acquire a settlement currency very cheaply, possibly even at below market rates. You do this by waiting for someone to make a payment that delivers that asset you want to get rid of. You take the XRP they got in exchange for the asset they’re paying with. So companies (like Uber or AirBNB) that makes lots of payments can acquire XRP cheaply by market making, which also provides liquidity for other people’s payments.

Why would companies like Uber and AirBNB want to acquire XRP cheaply? Because if it’s a settlement currency in many corridors they need to make payments to, they can make their payments cheaply if they already have XRP. Instead of having to buy XRP from a market maker, they’ll already have it and only have to pay for the “from XRP” side of the payment.

So if Ripple is successful in positioning XRP as a settlement currency, even if FIs don’t hold XRP, companies that make lots of payments around the world would be incentivized to act as market makers to acquire XRP cheaply and then use that XRP to make outbound payments cheaply. This could be a significant source of demand.

A nocoiner, according to Urban Dictionary, is someone who has no bitcoin. But not everyone who has no bitcoin is necessarily a nocoiner.

Rather, what makes a nocoiner a nocoiner is not simply the absence of cryptocurrency from his investment portfolio, but his sanctimonious attitude about it.

Urban Dictionary's definition, which was posted in December - about the time the word entered wide usage in the bitcoin community - goes on to describe nocoiners as:

"....people who missed their opportunity to buy Bitcoin at a low price ... and who [are] now bitter at having missed out. The nocoiner takes out his or her bitterness on Bitcoin Hodlers, by constantly claiming that Bitcoin will crash, is a scam, is a bubble, or other types of easily refuted FUD."

In other words, a nocoiner is full of what philosophers call ressentiment, defined by La Wik as "a reassignment of the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an external scapegoat."

The Twitter user known as @crackbagged picked up on this psychological insight in a Medium post in June of last year, warning fellow bitcoiners not to gloat when the price reaches $1 million:

"The people you told about Bitcoin may turn on you and assault you. You might be accused of witchcraft and thrown down a well, or worse. The mind of a nocoiner (a person who has no Bitcoin) is a dangerous place."

Marco Santori, a lawyer who's represented bitcoin startups since the early days and now the president and chief legal officer of wallet provider Blockchain, recently tweeted his distaste for the word "nocoiner," writing that "it has a bitter us-vs-them flavor to it" and "smacks of partisan tribalism."

But nocoiners engage in tribal signalling at least as much as bitcoiners. The nocoiner isn't just skeptical or even bearish about bitcoin. He feigns epistemic certainty that it will fail.

A nocoiner doesn't simply express doubt about the use cases for cryptocurrency - he declares, unequivocally, that there are no use cases at all, in the face of evidence to the contrary. (A subset of nocoiners will assert that the only uses are criminal, implicitly committing the logical fallacy of appeal to the law.)

The nocoiner mocks the bitcoiner's evangelical fervor, but he is every bit as religious in his convictions - and nowhere near as endearing.

The first use of "nocoiner" on Twitter is believed to have been in February 2017, though the term's apparently been used in 4chan forums for several years. But nocoiners have arguably been around since long before Satoshi's white paper. As long as humans have walked the Earth, perhaps.

In the late 19th century, Nietzsche compared the nocoiners of the day to tarantulas: "In all their lamentations soundeth vengeance ... and being judge seemeth to them bliss."

Mea culpaCards on the table: I myself was a proto-nocoiner in the late 1990s, a good 10 years before bitcoin's Genesis block.

Working at a daily banking newspaper (a phrase that will be indecipherable to our grandchildren), I sneered at the dot-com boom and regularly gawked at F**ked Company, a website that printed unvetted rumors of layoffs and bankruptcies at the era's highflying startups (what an edgy name, I thought then).

Incredulous about market valuations for companies with no profits or even revenues, I rolled my eyes and looked forward to the day when the the internet bubble would burst. Once this nonsense is over, I thought, we can concentrate on writing about serious companies. Like Countrywide, ha ha.

In my defense, a lot of those tech companies I scoffed at were indeed frivolous, and most went belly-up or got acquired. But the internet still transformed the economy (though the financial services industry less so) and the subsequent mortgage boom and bust were far more destructive, all things considered.

Even Fast Company is still around, while the tawdry gossip site that spoofed the magazine's name is long forgotten. Its rapier-like subtlety lives on at the r/buttcoin subreddit.

To be clear: The lesson from that era was not that we should revere entrepreneurs or accept all technologists' claims unchallenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses over, question your assumptions about how the world will always work - and don't confuse a beautiful horse (the world wide web, bitcoin) with the flies buzzing around its rear end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox).

In other words, you don't have to hold or even like bitcoin. Just don't be a nocoiner.

To be clear: The lesson from that era was not that we should revere entrepreneurs or accept all technologists' claims unchallenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses over, question your assumptions about how the world will always work - and don't confuse a beautiful horse (the world wide web, bitcoin) with the flies buzzing around its rear end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox).

.....

Thats some grade A shite right there. You don't have to buy bitcoin to do that.

To be clear: The lesson from that era was not that we should revere entrepreneurs or accept all technologists' claims unchallenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses over, question your assumptions about how the world will always work - and don't confuse a beautiful horse (the world wide web, bitcoin) with the flies buzzing around its rear end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox).

.....

Thats some grade A shite right there. You don't have to buy bitcoin to do that.

Literally the next sentence:

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In other words, you don't have to hold or even like bitcoin. Just don't be a nocoiner.

To be clear: The lesson from that era was not that we should revere entrepreneurs or accept all technologists' claims unchallenged. Rather, keep an open mind, think beyond the quarterly metrics Wall Street obsesses over, question your assumptions about how the world will always work - and don't confuse a beautiful horse (the world wide web, bitcoin) with the flies buzzing around its rear end (Pets.com, Mt. Gox).

.....

Thats some grade A shite right there. You don't have to buy bitcoin to do that.

Literally the next sentence:

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In other words, you don't have to hold or even like bitcoin. Just don't be a nocoiner.

Yeah I can read. You gotta be super clever and virtuous to own the monorail.

One of the podcasts I listen to is Click from the BBC World Service and It feels like every other feature has somebody eulogising how blockchains are going to fundamentally change their industry, it does remind me of the dot com 80’s with solid core underlying technology but with overblown expectations but then I’m an old fart now so there’s a good chance I’m talking shit.